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Economic sanctions are not and have never been effective forms of foreign policy. To understand this, we ought to better contextualize the issue of sanctions:

the Iraqi sanctions during the Clinton Admin. was responsible for over 500,000 deaths of innocent men, woman and children. The regime does not suffer during these sanctions (they live lavishly to begin with); the people do. It’s a dirty little trick from the hegemonist’s playbook in order to collapse an entire nation’s identity and well-being in order to replace it with Western norms and ideologies.

Interesting how Matt Duss framed the issue around the finance industry and how bankers are being affected in Iran due to sanctions. he quite simply fails to see its consequential affects as well — as if only the bankers are pinching pennies and tightening up their belts. As the Guardian explains in a recent article, “although sanctions are not directly targeting Iranian pharmacies and medical sectors, measures imposed on Iranian banks and trade restrictions have made life extremely difficult for patients across the country, who are facing difficulties in finding medicines made outside Iran… 75% of the medicines for the treatment of haemophilia are made in the US and the EU, making Iranian patients heavily dependent on their imports.” Clearly this issue hits home for Iranians, especially those in the poorer economic brackets.

The above article also gives us a chilling example of what this means for the everyday Iranian: meet Manouchehr Esmaili-Liousi, a 15-year-old boy from a nomadic tribe based in the mountains near the city of Dezful, in Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan. He died because his family was unable to get the hemophiliac medicine he needed due to the sanctions’ compounding effect (see link below).

Furthermore, and perhaps more disturbing, this dialogue failed to understand the contextual matrix of Western hegemony. The sanctions, quite simply, are a part of what Klein describes as a “shock doctrine,” where the US shocks entire cultures and nations via cutthroat policy, breaks down the order, and then swoops in like Superman to save the day i.e. set up Western military and economic institutions in order to increase the empire’s global sway. We did it in Chile, we did it in Iraq, we did it in Afghanistan. — How’s that workin’ out for us??

Sanctions aren’t about real diplomacy; never was. Hell, we are funding the FSA — which is AQ affiliated! — in Syria to cause regime change, primarily to get a geopolitical hold on Iran. Hell, Obama is flippin’ through baseball cards of bad guys and greenlighting extrajudicial hits on people that aren’t even materially associated with AQ via the “disposition matrix.” If this isn’t clairvoyant pre-crime, then I don’t know what is *Philip K. Dick rolling over in his grave*

The media, as this podcast episode testifies, fails to understand the larger game at play here. We don’t sit down at the table and negotiate policy; we take cheap shots under the table because we have the might to do so, because we are an empire. This is inverted and obfuscated by the MSM though with its clever disinformation program. Opt out: watch Democracy Now! or RT or AJE. Take the red pill.

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